research paper on poetry

Poetry & Poets

Explore the beauty of poetry – discover the poet within

How To Write A Poetry Research Paper

Introduction

Writing a poetry research paper can be an intimidating task for students. Even for experienced writers, the process of writing a research paper on poetry can be daunting. However, there are a few helpful tips and guidelines that can help make the process easier. Writing a research paper on poetry requires the student to have an analytical understanding of the poet or poet’s work and to utilize multiple sources of evidence in order to make a convincing argument. Before starting the research paper, it is important to properly analyze the poem and to understand the form, structure, and language of the poem.

The process of writing a research paper requires numerous steps, beginning with researching the poet and poem. If a poet is unknown, the research process must be started by learning about their biography, other works, and their impact on society. With online databases, libraries, and archives the research process can move quickly. It is important to carefully document sources for later use when creating bibliographies for the paper. Once the process of researching the poem has been completed, the next step is to analyze the poem itself. It is important for the student to read the poem carefully in order to understand the meaning, as well as its tone, imagery, and metaphors. Furthermore, analyzing other poems by the same poet can help students observe patterns, trends, or elements of a poet’s work.

Outlining and Structure

Outlining the research paper is just as important as analyzing the poem itself. Many students make the mistake of not taking enough time to craft a detailed outline that follows the structure of the paper. An effective outline will make process of writing the research paper more efficient, allowing for ease of transitions between sections of the paper. When writing the paper, it is important to think through the structure of the paper and how to make a strong argument. Support for the argument should be based on concrete evidence, such as literary criticism, literary theory, and close readings of the poem. It is essential to have a clear argument that is consistent throughout the body of the paper.

Citing Sources

When writing a research paper it is also important to cite all sources that are used. The style used for citing sources will depend on the style guide indicated by the professor or the school’s guidelines. Whether using MLA, APA, or Chicago style, it is important to adhere to the style guide indicated in order to have a complete and well-written paper.

Once the research and outlining is complete, the process of drafting a poetry research paper can begin. When constructing the first draft, it is especially useful to re-read the poem and to recall evidence that supports the argument made about the poem. Additionally, it is important to proofread and edit the first draft in order to make the argument more clear and to check for any grammar or spelling errors.

Writing a research paper on poetry does not have to be a difficult task. By taking the time to properly research, analyze, and structure the paper, the process of writing a successful poetry research paper becomes easier. Following these steps— researching the poet, understanding the poem itself, outlining the paper, citing sources, and drafting the paper— will ensure a great and thorough paper is prepared.

Using Imagery and Metaphor

The use of imagery and metaphor is an essential element when writing poetry. Imagery can be used to provide vivid descriptions of scenes and characters, while metaphor can be used to create deeper meanings and analogies. Understanding the use of imagery and metaphor can help to break down the poem and discover hidden meanings. Students researching poetry should pay special attentions to the poetic devices used to further the story or allusions to other works, such as classical mythology. Paying close attention to the language, metaphors, and imagery used by the poet can help to uncover the true meaning of the poem. By breaking down the element of the poem and focusing on individual elements, it is much easier to make valid conclusions about the poem and its author.

Understanding Rhyme and Meter

Rhyme and meter are two of the most important and complex elements of poetry. These two poetic techniques are used to help the poet structure their poem to provide rhythm and flow. Most commonly, rhyme and meter help to provide emphasis to certain words or phrases to give them additional meaning. When analyzing poetry, it is important to pay attention to the written rhyme schemes and meter of the poem. There are various patterns of rhyme, such as couplets, tercets, and quatrains. Meter, usually governed by iambs and trochees, can give the poem an added sense of rhythm to further emphasize certain words, phrases, or thoughts.

Exploring Themes

Themes are the central ideas behind a poem. The themes of a poem can be subtle and can be found in the language and images used. Exploring the poem through a thematic analysis can help to identify the true meaning of the poem and the message that the poet is conveying. When researching a poem, it is important to identify the primary theme of the poem and to look for evidence in the poem that can be used to support the claim. By paying attention to the language of a poem, students can uncover the deeper meanings within the poem and can move past the literal interpretation of the poem.

Analyzing Discourse and Context

In addition to the written aspects of a poem, it is important to consider the historical and social context of the poem. The context of the poem can be used to further understand its deeper meanings and implications. Collingwood’s theory of re-enactment can be used to reconstruct the context of a poem in order to gain a deeper understanding of the poem. When researching a poem, it is important to consider the the time period in which the poem was written, the author’s other works, and the broader literary context of the poem. Examining the discourse used by the poet can help to uncover the true message of the poem and the impact on society at the time.

Finding Inspiration

When researching poetry, it is important for the student to find inspiration in the form of other authors, critics, and theorists. Studying the works of other authors can provide valuable insight into a poem and can inform the student’s own interpretations. In addition to studying critics and theorists, the student should also look to other poets and authors as sources of inspiration. The student can explore the works of similar poets or authors to learn how they use their poetic elements in their work. This can help students to gain insight into the language, imagery, and themes present in the poem being researched.

Minnie Walters

Minnie Walters is a passionate writer and lover of poetry. She has a deep knowledge and appreciation for the work of famous poets such as William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and many more. She hopes you will also fall in love with poetry!

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Writing About Poetry

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Writing about poetry can be one of the most demanding tasks that many students face in a literature class. Poetry, by its very nature, makes demands on a writer who attempts to analyze it that other forms of literature do not. So how can you write a clear, confident, well-supported essay about poetry? This handout offers answers to some common questions about writing about poetry.

What's the Point?

In order to write effectively about poetry, one needs a clear idea of what the point of writing about poetry is. When you are assigned an analytical essay about a poem in an English class, the goal of the assignment is usually to argue a specific thesis about the poem, using your analysis of specific elements in the poem and how those elements relate to each other to support your thesis.

So why would your teacher give you such an assignment? What are the benefits of learning to write analytic essays about poetry? Several important reasons suggest themselves:

• To help you learn to make a text-based argument. That is, to help you to defend ideas based on a text that is available to you and other readers. This sharpens your reasoning skills by forcing you to formulate an interpretation of something someone else has written and to support that interpretation by providing logically valid reasons why someone else who has read the poem should agree with your argument. This isn't a skill that is just important in academics, by the way. Lawyers, politicians, and journalists often find that they need to make use of similar skills.
• To help you to understand what you are reading more fully. Nothing causes a person to make an extra effort to understand difficult material like the task of writing about it. Also, writing has a way of helping you to see things that you may have otherwise missed simply by causing you to think about how to frame your own analysis.
• To help you enjoy poetry more! This may sound unlikely, but one of the real pleasures of poetry is the opportunity to wrestle with the text and co-create meaning with the author. When you put together a well-constructed analysis of the poem, you are not only showing that you understand what is there, you are also contributing to an ongoing conversation about the poem. If your reading is convincing enough, everyone who has read your essay will get a little more out of the poem because of your analysis.

What Should I Know about Writing about Poetry?

Most importantly, you should realize that a paper that you write about a poem or poems is an argument. Make sure that you have something specific that you want to say about the poem that you are discussing. This specific argument that you want to make about the poem will be your thesis. You will support this thesis by drawing examples and evidence from the poem itself. In order to make a credible argument about the poem, you will want to analyze how the poem works—what genre the poem fits into, what its themes are, and what poetic techniques and figures of speech are used.

What Can I Write About?

Theme: One place to start when writing about poetry is to look at any significant themes that emerge in the poetry. Does the poetry deal with themes related to love, death, war, or peace? What other themes show up in the poem? Are there particular historical events that are mentioned in the poem? What are the most important concepts that are addressed in the poem?

Genre: What kind of poem are you looking at? Is it an epic (a long poem on a heroic subject)? Is it a sonnet (a brief poem, usually consisting of fourteen lines)? Is it an ode? A satire? An elegy? A lyric? Does it fit into a specific literary movement such as Modernism, Romanticism, Neoclassicism, or Renaissance poetry? This is another place where you may need to do some research in an introductory poetry text or encyclopedia to find out what distinguishes specific genres and movements.

Versification: Look closely at the poem's rhyme and meter. Is there an identifiable rhyme scheme? Is there a set number of syllables in each line? The most common meter for poetry in English is iambic pentameter, which has five feet of two syllables each (thus the name "pentameter") in each of which the strongly stressed syllable follows the unstressed syllable. You can learn more about rhyme and meter by consulting our handout on sound and meter in poetry or the introduction to a standard textbook for poetry such as the Norton Anthology of Poetry . Also relevant to this category of concerns are techniques such as caesura (a pause in the middle of a line) and enjambment (continuing a grammatical sentence or clause from one line to the next). Is there anything that you can tell about the poem from the choices that the author has made in this area? For more information about important literary terms, see our handout on the subject.

Figures of speech: Are there literary devices being used that affect how you read the poem? Here are some examples of commonly discussed figures of speech:

• metaphor: comparison between two unlike things
• simile: comparison between two unlike things using "like" or "as"
• metonymy: one thing stands for something else that is closely related to it (For example, using the phrase "the crown" to refer to the king would be an example of metonymy.)
• synecdoche: a part stands in for a whole (For example, in the phrase "all hands on deck," "hands" stands in for the people in the ship's crew.)
• personification: a non-human thing is endowed with human characteristics
• litotes: a double negative is used for poetic effect (example: not unlike, not displeased)
• irony: a difference between the surface meaning of the words and the implications that may be drawn from them

Cultural Context: How does the poem you are looking at relate to the historical context in which it was written? For example, what's the cultural significance of Walt Whitman's famous elegy for Lincoln "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" in light of post-Civil War cultural trends in the U.S.A? How does John Donne's devotional poetry relate to the contentious religious climate in seventeenth-century England? These questions may take you out of the literature section of your library altogether and involve finding out about philosophy, history, religion, economics, music, or the visual arts.

What Style Should I Use?

It is useful to follow some standard conventions when writing about poetry. First, when you analyze a poem, it is best to use present tense rather than past tense for your verbs. Second, you will want to make use of numerous quotations from the poem and explain their meaning and their significance to your argument. After all, if you do not quote the poem itself when you are making an argument about it, you damage your credibility. If your teacher asks for outside criticism of the poem as well, you should also cite points made by other critics that are relevant to your argument. A third point to remember is that there are various citation formats for citing both the material you get from the poems themselves and the information you get from other critical sources. The most common citation format for writing about poetry is the Modern Language Association (MLA) format .

EH -- Researching Poems: Strategies for Poetry Research

• Find Articles
• Strategies for Poetry Research

Page Overview

This page addresses the research process -- the things that should be done before the actual writing of the paper -- and strategies for engaging in the process.  Although this LibGuide focuses on researching poems or poetry, this particular page is more general in scope and is applicable to most lower-division college research assignments.

Before You Begin

Before beginning any research process, first be absolutely sure you know the requirements of the assignment.  Things such as  

• the date the completed project is due 
• the due dates of any intermediate assignments, like turning in a working bibliography or notes
• the length requirement (minimum word count), if any 
• the minimum number and types (for example, books or articles from scholarly, peer-reviewed journals) of sources required

These formal requirements are as much a part of the assignment as the paper itself.  They form the box into which you must fit your work.  Do not take them lightly.

When possible, it is helpful to subdivide the overall research process into phases, a tactic which

• makes the idea of research less intimidating because you are dealing with sections at a time rather than the whole process
• makes the process easier to manage
• gives a sense of accomplishment as you move from one phase to the next

Characteristics of a Well-written Paper

Although there are many details that must be given attention in writing a research paper, there are three major criteria which must be met.  A well-written paper is

• Unified:  the paper has only one major idea; or, if it seeks to address multiple points, one point is given priority and the others are subordinated to it.
• Coherent: the body of the paper presents its contents in a logical order easy for readers to follow; use of transitional phrases (in addition, because of this, therefore, etc.) between paragraphs and sentences is important.
• Complete:  the paper delivers on everything it promises and does not leave questions in the mind of the reader; everything mentioned in the introduction is discussed somewhere in the paper; the conclusion does not introduce new ideas or anything not already addressed in the paper.

Basic Research Strategy

• How to Research From Pellissippi State Community College Libraries: discusses the principal components of a simple search strategy.
• Basic Research Strategies From Nassau Community College: a start-up guide for college level research that supplements the information in the preceding link. Tabs two, three, and four plus the Web Evaluation tab are the most useful for JSU students. As with any LibGuide originating from another campus, care must be taken to recognize the information which is applicable generally from that which applies solely to the Guide's home campus. .
• Information Literacy Tutorial From Nassau Community College: an elaboration on the material covered in the preceding link (also from NCC) which discusses that material in greater depth. The quizzes and surveys may be ignored.

Things to Keep in Mind

Although a research assignment can be daunting, there are things which can make the process less stressful, more manageable, and yield a better result.  And they are generally applicable across all types and levels of research.

1.  Be aware of the parameters of the assignment: topic selection options, due date, length requirement, source requirements.  These form the box into which you must fit your work.  

2. Treat the assignment as a series of components or stages rather than one undivided whole.

• devise a schedule for each task in the process: topic selection and refinement (background/overview information), source material from books (JaxCat), source material from journals (databases/Discovery), other sources (internet, interviews, non-print materials); the note-taking, drafting, and editing processes.
• stick to your timetable.  Time can be on your side as a researcher, but only if you keep to your schedule and do not delay or put everything off until just before the assignment deadline. 

3.  Leave enough time between your final draft and the submission date of your work that you can do one final proofread after the paper is no longer "fresh" to you.  You may find passages that need additional work because you see that what is on the page and what you meant to write are quite different.  Even better, have a friend or classmate read your final draft before you submit it.  A fresh pair of eyes sometimes has clearer vision. 

4.  If at any point in the process you encounter difficulties, consult a librarian.  Hunters use guides; fishermen use guides.  Explorers use guides.  When you are doing research, you are an explorer in the realm of ideas; your librarian is your guide. 

A Note on Sources

Research requires engagement with various types of sources.

• Primary sources: the thing itself, such as letters, diaries, documents, a painting, a sculpture; in lower-division literary research, usually a play, poem, or short story.
• Secondary sources: information about the primary source, such as books, essays, journal articles, although images and other media also might be included.  Companions, dictionaries, and encyclopedias are secondary sources.
• Tertiary sources: things such as bibliographies, indexes, or electronic databases (minus the full text) which serve as guides to point researchers toward secondary sources.  A full text database would be a combination of a secondary and tertiary source; some books have a bibliography of additional sources in the back.

Accessing sources requires going through various "information portals," each designed to principally support a certain type of content.  Houston Cole Library provides four principal information portals:

• JaxCat online catalog: books, although other items such as journals, newspapers, DVDs, and musical scores also may be searched for.
• Electronic databases: journal articles, newspaper stories, interviews, reviews (and a few books; JaxCat still should be the "go-to" portal for books).  JaxCat indexes records for the complete item: the book, journal, newspaper, CD but has no records for parts of the complete item: the article in the journal, the editorial in the newspaper, the song off the CD.  Databases contain records for these things.
• Discovery Search: mostly journal articles, but also (some) books and (some) random internet pages.  Discovery combines elements of the other three information portals and is especially useful for searches where one is researching a new or obscure topic about which little is likely to be written, or does not know where the desired information may be concentrated.  Discovery is the only portal which permits simul-searching across databases provided by multiple vendors.
• Internet (Bing, Dogpile, DuckDuckGo, Google, etc.): primarily webpages, especially for businesses (.com), government divisions at all levels (.gov), or organizations (.org). as well as pages for primary source-type documents such as lesson plans and public-domain books.  While book content (Google Books) and journal articles (Google Scholar) are accessible, these are not the strengths of the internet and more successful searches for this type of content can be performed through JaxCat and the databases.  

NOTE: There is no predetermined hierarchy among these information portals as regards which one should be used most or gone to first.  These considerations depend on the task at hand and will vary from assignment o assignment.

The link below provides further information on the different source types.

• Research Methods From Truckee Meadows Community College: a guide to basic research. The tab "What Type of Source?" presents an overview of the various types of information sources, identifying the advantages and disadvantages of each.
• << Previous: Find Books
• Last Updated: Apr 19, 2024 7:27 AM
• URL: https://libguides.jsu.edu/litresearchpoems

Poetry Explained

How to Write a Poetry Essay (Complete Guide)

Unlock success in poetry essays with our comprehensive guide. Uncover the process to help aid understanding of how best to create a poetry essay.

While many of us read poetry for pleasure, it is undeniable that many poetry readers do so in the knowledge that they will be assessed on the text they are reading, either in an exam, for homework, or for a piece of coursework. This is clearly a daunting task for many, and lots of students don’t even know where to begin. We’re here to help! This guide will take you through all the necessary steps so that you can plan and write great poetry essays every time. If you’re still getting to grips with the different techniques, terms, or some other aspect of poetry, then check out our other available resources at the bottom of this page.

This Guide was Created by Joe Samantaria

Degree in English and Related Literature, and a Masters in Irish Literature

Upon completion of his degrees, Joe is an English tutor and counts W.B. Yeats , Emily Brontë , and Federico Garcia Lorca among his favorite poets. He has helped tutor hundreds of students with poetry and aims to do the same for readers and Poetry + users on Poem Analysis.

How to Write a Poetry Essay

• 1 Before You Start…
• 2 Introductions
• 3 Main Paragraphs
• 4 Conclusions
• 6 Other Resources

Before You Start…

Before we begin, we must address the fact that all poetry essays are different from one another on account of different academic levels, whether or not the essay pertains to one poem or multiple, and the intended length of the essay. That is before we even contend with the countless variations and distinctions between individual poems. Thus, it is impossible to produce a single, one-size-fits-all template for writing great essays on poetry because the criteria for such an essay are not universal. This guide is, therefore, designed to help you go about writing a simple essay on a single poem, which comes to roughly 1000-1200 words in length. We have designed it this way to mirror the requirements of as many students around the world as possible. It is our intention to write another guide on how to write a comparative poetry essay at a later date. Finally, we would like to stress the fact that this guide is exactly that: a guide. It is not a set of restrictive rules but rather a means of helping you get to grips with writing poetry essays. Think of it more like a recipe that, once practiced a few times, can be modified and adapted as you see fit.

The first and most obvious starting point is the poem itself and there are some important things to do at this stage before you even begin contemplating writing your essay. Naturally, these things will depend on the nature of the essay you are required to write.

• Is the poem one you are familiar with?
• Do you know anything about the context of the poem or the poet?
• How much time do you have to complete the essay?
• Do you have access to books or the internet?

These questions matter because they will determine the type, length, and scope of the essay you write. Naturally, an essay written under timed conditions about an unfamiliar poem will look very different from one written about a poem known to you. Likewise, teachers and examiners will expect different things from these essays and will mark them accordingly.

As this article pertains to writing a poverty essay, we’re going to assume you have a grasp of the basics of understanding the poems themselves. There is a plethora of materials available that can help you analyze poetry if you need to, and thousands of analyzed poems are available right here. For the sake of clarity, we advise you to use these tools to help you get to grips with the poem you intend to write about before you ever sit down to actually produce an essay. As we have said, the amount of time spent pondering the poem will depend on the context of the essay. If you are writing a coursework-style question over many weeks, then you should spend hours analyzing the poem and reading extensively about its context. If, however, you are writing an essay in an exam on a poem you have never seen before, you should perhaps take 10-15% of the allotted time analyzing the poem before you start writing.

The Question

Once you have spent enough time analyzing the poem and identifying its key features and themes, you can turn your attention to the question. It is highly unlikely that you will simply be asked to “analyze this poem.” That would be too simple on the one hand and far too broad on the other.

More likely, you will be asked to analyze a particular aspect of the poem, usually pertaining to its message, themes, or meaning. There are numerous ways examiners can express these questions, so we have outlined some common types of questions below.

• Explore the poet’s presentation of…
• How does the poet present…
• Explore the ways the writer portrays their thoughts about…

These are all similar ways of achieving the same result. In each case, the examiner requires that you analyze the devices used by the poet and attempt to tie the effect those devices have to the poet’s broader intentions or meaning.

Some students prefer reading the question before they read the poem, so they can better focus their analytical eye on devices and features that directly relate to the question they are being asked. This approach has its merits, especially for poems that you have not previously seen. However, be wary of focusing too much on a single element of a poem, particularly if it is one you may be asked to write about again in a later exam. It is no good knowing only how a poem links to the theme of revenge if you will later be asked to explore its presentation of time.

Essay plans can help focus students’ attention when they’re under pressure and give them a degree of confidence while they’re writing. In basic terms, a plan needs the following elements:

• An overarching answer to the question (this will form the basis of your introduction)
• A series of specific, identifiable poetic devices ( metaphors , caesura , juxtaposition , etc) you have found in the poem
• Ideas about how these devices link to the poem’s messages or themes.
• Some pieces of relevant context (depending on whether you need it for your type of question)

In terms of layout, we do not want to be too prescriptive. Some students prefer to bullet-point their ideas, and others like to separate them by paragraph. If you use the latter approach, you should aim for:

• 1 Introduction
• 4-5 Main paragraphs
• 1 Conclusion

Finally, the length and detail of your plan should be dictated by the nature of the essay you are doing. If you are under exam conditions, you should not spend too much time writing a plan, as you will need that time for the essay itself. Conversely, if you are not under time pressure, you should take your time to really build out your plan and fill in the details.

Introductions

If you have followed all the steps to this point, you should be ready to start writing your essay. All good essays begin with an introduction, so that is where we shall start.

When it comes to introductions, the clue is in the name: this is the place for you to introduce your ideas and answer the question in broad terms. This means that you don’t need to go into too much detail, as you’ll be doing that in the main body of the essay. That means you don’t need quotes, and you’re unlikely to need to quote anything from the poem yet. One thing to remember is that you should mention both the poet’s name and the poem’s title in your introduction. This might seem unnecessary, but it is a good habit to get into, especially if you are writing an essay in which other questions/poems are available to choose from.

As we mentioned earlier, you are unlikely to get a question that simply asks you to analyze a poem in its entirety, with no specific angle. More likely, you’ll be asked to write an essay about a particular thematic element of the poem. Your introduction should reflect this. However, many students fall into the trap of simply regurgitating the question without offering anything more. For example, a question might ask you to explore a poet’s presentation of love, memory, loss, or conflict . You should avoid the temptation to simply hand these terms back in your introduction without expanding upon them. You will get a chance to see this in action below.

Let’s say we were given the following question:

Explore Patrick Kavanagh’s presentation of loss and memory in Memory of My Father

Taking on board the earlier advice, you should hopefully produce an introduction similar to the one written below.

Patrick Kavanagh presents loss as an inescapable fact of existence and subverts the readers’ expectations of memory by implying that memories can cause immense pain, even if they feature loved ones. This essay will argue that Memory of My Father depicts loss to be cyclical and thus emphasizes the difficulties that inevitably occur in the early stages of grief.

As you can see, the introduction is fairly condensed and does not attempt to analyze any specific poetic elements. There will be plenty of time for that as the essay progresses. Similarly, the introduction does not simply repeat the words ‘loss’ and ‘memory’ from the question but expands upon them and offers a glimpse of the kind of interpretation that will follow without providing too much unnecessary detail at this early stage.

Main Paragraphs

Now, we come to the main body of the essay, the quality of which will ultimately determine the strength of our essay. This section should comprise of 4-5 paragraphs, and each of these should analyze an aspect of the poem and then link the effect that aspect creates to the poem’s themes or message. They can also draw upon context when relevant if that is a required component of your particular essay.

There are a few things to consider when writing analytical paragraphs and many different templates for doing so, some of which are listed below.

• PEE (Point-Evidence-Explain)
• PEA (Point-Evidence-Analysis)
• PETAL (Point-Evidence-Technique-Analysis-Link)
• IQA (Identify-Quote-Analyze)
• PEEL (Point-Evidence-Explain-Link)

Some of these may be familiar to you, and they all have their merits. As you can see, there are all effective variations of the same thing. Some might use different terms or change the order, but it is possible to write great paragraphs using all of them.

One of the most important aspects of writing these kind of paragraphs is selecting the features you will be identifying and analyzing. A full list of poetic features with explanations can be found here. If you have done your plan correctly, you should have already identified a series of poetic devices and begun to think about how they link to the poem’s themes.

It is important to remember that, when analyzing poetry, everything is fair game! You can analyze the language, structure, shape, and punctuation of the poem. Try not to rely too heavily on any single type of paragraph. For instance, if you have written three paragraphs about linguistic features ( similes , hyperbole , alliteration , etc), then try to write your next one about a structural device ( rhyme scheme , enjambment , meter , etc).

Regardless of what structure you are using, you should remember that multiple interpretations are not only acceptable but actively encouraged. Techniques can create effects that link to the poem’s message or themes in both complementary and entirely contrasting ways. All these possibilities should find their way into your essay. You are not writing a legal argument that must be utterly watertight – you are interpreting a subjective piece of art.

It is important to provide evidence for your points in the form of either a direct quotation or, when appropriate, a reference to specific lines or stanzas . For instance, if you are analyzing a strict rhyme scheme, you do not need to quote every rhyming word. Instead, you can simply name the rhyme scheme as, for example, AABB , and then specify whether or not this rhyme scheme is applied consistently throughout the poem or not. When you are quoting a section from the poem, you should endeavor to embed your quotation within your line so that your paragraph flows and can be read without cause for confusion.

When it comes to context, remember to check whether or not your essay question requires it before you begin writing. If you do need to use it, you must remember that it is used to elevate your analysis of the poem, not replace it. Think of context like condiments or spices. When used appropriately, they can enhance the experience of eating a meal, but you would have every right to complain if a restaurant served you a bowl of ketchup in lieu of an actual meal. Moreover, you should remember to only use the contextual information that helps your interpretation rather than simply writing down facts to prove you have memorized them. Examiners will not be impressed that you know the date a particular poet was born or died unless that information relates to the poem itself.

For the sake of ease, let’s return to our earlier question:

Have a look at the example paragraph below, taking note of the ways in which it interprets the linguistic technique in several different ways.

Kavanagh uses a metaphor when describing how the narrator ’s father had “fallen in love with death” in order to capture the narrator’s conflicted attitudes towards his loss. By conflating the ordinarily juxtaposed states of love and death, Kavanagh implies the narrator’s loss has shattered his previously held understanding of the world and left him confused. Similarly, the metaphor could suggest the narrator feels a degree of jealousy, possibly even self-loathing, because their father embraced death willingly rather than remaining with the living. Ultimately, the metaphor’s innate impossibility speaks to the narrator’s desire to rationalize their loss because the reality, that his father simply died, is too painful for him to bear.

As you can see, the paragraph clearly engages with a poetic device and uses an appropriately embedded quotation. The subsequent interpretations are then varied enough to avoid repeating each other, but all clearly link to the theme of loss that was mentioned in the question. Obviously, this is only one analytical paragraph, but a completed essay should contain 4-5. This would allow the writer to analyze enough different devices and link them to both themes mentioned in the question.

Conclusions

By this stage, you should have written the bulk of your essay in the form of your introduction and 4-5 main analytical paragraphs. If you have done those things properly, then the conclusion should largely take care of itself.

The world’s simplest essay plan sounds something like this:

• Tell them what you’re going to tell them
• Tell them what you’ve told them

This is, naturally, an oversimplification, but it is worth bearing in mind. The conclusion to an essay is not the place to introduce your final, groundbreaking interpretation. Nor is it the place to reveal a hitherto unknown piece of contextual information that shatters any prior critical consensus with regard to the poem you are writing about. If you do either of these things, the examiner will be asking themselves one simple question: why didn’t they write this earlier?

In its most simple form, a conclusion is there, to sum up the points you have made and nothing more.

As with the previous sections, there is a little more to a great conclusion than merely stating the things you have already made. The trick to a great conclusion is to bind those points together to emphasize the essay’s overarching thread or central argument. This is a subtle skill, but mastering it will really help you to finish your essays with a flourish by making your points feel like they are more than the sum of their parts.

Finally, let’s remind ourselves of the hypothetical essay question we’ve been using:

Remember that, just like your introduction, your conclusion should be brief and direct and must not attempt to do more than it needs to.

In conclusion, Kavanagh’s poem utilizes numerous techniques to capture the ways in which loss is both inescapable and a source of enormous pain. Moreover, the poet subverts positive memories by showcasing how they can cause loved ones more pain than comfort in the early stages of grief. Ultimately, the poem demonstrates how malleable memory can be in the face of immense loss due to the way the latter shapes and informs the former.

As you can see, this conclusion is confident and authoritative but does not need to provide evidence to justify this tone because that evidence has already been provided earlier in the essay. You should pay close attention to the manner in which the conclusion links different points together under one banner in order to provide a sense of assuredness.

You should refer to the poet by either using their full name or, more commonly, their surname. After your first usage, you may refer to them as ‘the poet.’ Never refer to the poet using just their first name.

This is a good question, and the answer entirely depends on the level of study as well as the nature of the examination. If you are writing a timed essay for a school exam, you are unlikely to need any form of referencing. If, however, you are writing an essay as part of coursework or at a higher education institution, you may need to refer to the specific guidelines of that institution.

Again, this will depend on the type of essay you are being asked to write. If you are writing a longer essay or writing at a higher educational level, it can be useful to refer to other poems in the writer’s repertoire to help make comments on an aspect of the poem you are primarily writing about. However, for the kind of essay outlined in this article, you should focus solely on the poem you have been asked to write about.

This is one of the most common concerns students have about writing essays . Ultimately, the quality of an essay is more likely to be determined by the quality of paragraphs than the quantity anyway, so you should focus on making your paragraphs as good as they can be. Beyond this, it is important to remember that the time required to write a paragraph is not fixed. The more you write, the faster they will become. You should trust the process, focus on making each paragraph as good as it can be, and you’ll be amazed at how the timing issue takes care of itself.

Other Resources

We hope you have found this article useful and would love for you to comment or reach out to us if you have any queries about what we’ve written. We’d love to hear your feedback!

In the meantime, we’ve collated a list of resources you might find helpful when setting out to tackle a poetry essay, which you can find below.

• Do poems have to rhyme?
• 10 important elements of poetry
• How to analyze a poem with SMILE
• How to approach unseen poetry
• 18 Different Types of Themes in Poetry

Home » Poetry Explained » How to Write a Poetry Essay (Complete Guide)

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Santamaria, Joe. "How to Write a Poetry Essay (Complete Guide)". Poem Analysis , https://poemanalysis.com/how-to-write-a-poetry-essay/ . Accessed 6 July 2024.

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#PoemResearch: Notes on Researching as a Poet

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Late in Leaving the Atocha Station , Ben Lerner’ s novel about a young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, we receive this capsule description of the research project our narrator has successfully evaded and talked around:

Maybe if I remained I would pursue the project described so many months ago in my application, composing a long and research-driven poem, whatever that might mean, about the literary responses to the Civil War, exploring what such a moment could teach us about ‘literature now.’ My Spanish would rapidly improve; I would not read Ashbery or Garnett or anything else in English, but hurl myself headlong at the Spanish canon; I would become the poet I pretended to be and realize my project. I would buy a phone and consummate my relationship with Teresa.

Through his fictional proxy Adam Gordon, Lerner gives us an experience of what it feels like to be on prestigious fellowship—if you were, say, a talented young poet with an almost crippling self-awareness of the privileges afforded by race, class, and gender, but not so crippling as to take the fellowship, then novelize your paralysis. Your predicament is hilariously summed up by the phrase: “the experience of experience sponsored by my fellowship.” For you, experience never appears without modifiers or within square quotes. You worry the difference between research and experience , or perhaps their increasing interchangeability. Everything and everyone for you is potential research. You need critical distance from your life. The novelization of your unsentimental education will be conceptualized, divided, and ironized into “phases,” a technique that will allow you to acknowledge institutional formations, structure the novel around a research plot, and gesture toward questions about the ways in which modern poetry has been affected by scientific rationality. Like a good poet, you want to defend imagination against scientific rationality but the new language is not yet there for you. You fake it until you make it, and then when you have seemingly made it, you remain haunted by the ghost of the genuine—its possibility in art, in life, and in love. Reader, I have felt like Adam Gordon.

I’m a poet and not a researcher is something I said in a recent conversation with an editor. The editor thought I encompassed both. I balked at the idea, even though they meant it as a favorable observation, even though it was a perceptive recognition of my intellectual preoccupations, mixed materials, and impassioned methods. To my selective ears, researcher still sounded too much like a job description; it made me seem too industrious, purposeful, methodical, like I was working on a project. I’m a lazy poet, a lazier scholar. But the editor was a good reader of my poetry and helped me become a better reader of my own work, so I felt compelled to give the question more thought. I also knew that my repulsion was a defense mechanism. I associated research with the academic articles and monographs I was trained to produce as a graduate student in literature and those I am expected to produce as an English professor. Then and now, research is often the enjoyable and stimulating part; it is the academic writing part I find difficult and resistant to my creative impulses and intuition. My research has often found its way into my poetry. Many of my poems explore the memory, history, and legacy of the Vietnam War from my perspective as a second generation Vietnamese American, a subject I researched and wrote about for my dissertation. My scholarship and my creative writing share much of the same archives. It’s what I do with the research that differs. As a poet, that means making poems.

But how ought a poet research? What do poets talk about when we talk about research? Why is it that when poets talk about research it is either a joke or cloaked in an aurora of seriousness? Type the hashtag and see for yourself. You’ll find tweets by poets along the lines of What’s the Spanish word for hickey? What causes ringing in the ear? There is an entire Wikipedia page about dust. There are five distinctive morphological patterns of necrosis. Has anyone out there ever sucked the caviar from a live fish? (Salmon). If so, is it cold or warm? Thanks! Is research for poets another technique to create experience, like sex or intoxication?

Three poets who use research in reflexive and reflective ways:

Susan Howe shattered two images at once for me when I first encountered her work as an undergrad. The first image was that of the poet as untutored beatnik haunting dimly lit cafés. The second was the scholar as passionless brain in lab coat or tweed jacket. She gave me permission to be what Coleridge calls “a library cormorant.” In Howe’s hybrid work research creates situations that increase chance correspondences and triggers involuntary memories. Her recent book Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of the Archives , “a collaged swan song to the old ways” of researching, is a remarkable splicing of passion and intellect, re-collected documents and recollected experience:

Reading Paterson reminds me of walking barefoot across a small strip of common land near my house that’s littered with beach glass, broken oyster shells, razor clams and kelp. It’s called a beach, but no one swims there because even at high tide what is euphemistically referred to as “sand” quickly becomes marl, mud, and marsh grass. I feel the past vividly here—my own memories and the deeper past I like to explore in poems. As I look across Long Island Sound I can imagine it as an open ocean.

Reading and walking. The page and the landscape. In Howe’s work we find research and poetry so intertwined as to be indistinguishable, a formal experimentalism that trespasses the laws of genre. The bit of prose quoted above characteristically breaks off into a line of lyric flight—“O Thalassa, Thalassa! / the lash and hiss of water // The sea!” from William Carlos Williams’ s Paterson , Book III, The Library . In Howe’s title you hear echoes of Williams’s “to make a start / out of particulars” and think: No research but in things! For Howe, researching and writing are complementary, mutually affecting acts. Howe’s poet-researcher is a scout, a rover, a trespasser unsettling the wilderness of American literary history. Her poems and essays continually enact that anticipatory moment before discovery, of making connections, before anything is ever fixed into ideas. “If you are lucky,” she writes, “you may experience a moment before .” Reading her writing you experience the feeling of thinking: “Each collected object or manuscript is a pre-articulate empty theater where a thought may surprise itself at the instant of seeing. Where a thought may hear itself see.”

Natasha Trethewey’ s Native Guard is a rescue mission, like Howe’s work, to lift human voices out of historical silence. The title poem, based on the poet’s research into the history of the first black regiments during the Civil War, adopts the historical personae of the Louisiana Native Guards. I think of her “Native Guard” as Civil War reenactment pieces in sonnet form. Here is how the first sonnet, “November 1862,” opens the sequence:

Truth be told, I do not want to forget anything of my former life: the landscape’s song of bondage—dirge in the river’s throat where it churns into the Gulf, wind in trees choked with vines. I thought to carry with me want of freedom though I had been freed, remembrance not constant recollection.

Better perhaps to call “Native Guard” a monument of sonnets, as Trethewey uses her technical mastery of the formal verse to memorialize the black Union dead. In the corona (crown)—the last line of the initial sonnet acts as the first line of the next, and the ultimate sonnet’s final line repeats the first line of the initial sonnet—Trethewey finds a form to represent intersecting lines of history and the essential mixing that makes American identity. If “Native Guard” at times telegraphs its meaning and mission, the poems nonetheless seem willing to risk their more formulaic statements in order to achieve their re-visionary force as counter-narratives. “Some names shall deck the page of history / as it is written on stone. Some will not,” as it is written in the sonnet for “June 1863.” These poems do not engrave names (the speakers of the sonnets remain nameless), but instead they imagine past lives in the present tense. Other sonnets log the nightmare of history (“Last night, / I dreamt their eyes still open – dim, clouded / as the eyes of fish washed ashore, yet fixed - / staring back at me”). Trethewey describes her process of researching as a poet in an interview: “Then, before I could write I had to shove it all aside. I had to forget everything from the front of my brain, or at least in the foreground of my thinking, to forget all that I had read. But it was still there for me to access as I tried to write poems. It didn’t go away, but I had to get out of the mode of researcher and back into the mode of poet.” Trethewey has had to rely on her own intuition, invention, and imagination to conjure these voices from the past as if they had been passed down and collected in a research library. That is the melancholy of these sonnets as imagined documents. The sonnets stand in not only a proxy witness, but also as proxy documents for what has been lost or uncollected.

Robin Coste Lewis’ s Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems combines the experimentalism of Susan Howe with the formalism of Natasha Trethewey into a remarkable unity of autobiographical lyric, archival research, and literary activism. Structured as a triptych, the collection begins and ends with autobiographical lyric poems. The central panel is “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” an archival lyric made up entirely of the titles of artworks, from ancient times to the present, that feature or comment on the black female figure in Western art. The title poem is divided into eight sections, or “Catalogs,” a keyword that points back to the libraries, archives, and museums listed in the final “Notes” section of poem. In “Catalog 4: Medieval Colonial,” the list is one of numerous representational strategies:

The slaves escaping through the swamp, The Slave watching her pursuers in for e— Ground Black Woman walking in front of a Board Fence Background Plantation House and Outbuildings (or Slave Quarters). In a Grove of Trees Slave Woman wearing Runaway. Collar with Two Children, emaciated. Negro Man eating Dead. Horseflesh in the background. Negro Man strapped to a ladder, Being. Lashed Slave Woman seen

In Coste Lewis’s work a reader must constantly negotiate the meaning of what is being named and seen in a shifting “for e / Ground” that, as glimpsed in the above lines, becomes unsettled as words are pulled apart, isolated, and recombined, or punctuation errors and random capitalization disrupt the flow of reading. Here and elsewhere “Voyage” runs interference against the descriptive violence of representations of the black female figure in Western art—that is, descriptions of scenes of violence, but also descriptions that reveal ways of looking at, categorizing, ordering, and subjugating that rationalizes acts of violence. She uses the poetic catalogue against the colonial order of things, disordering the sight, sound, and sense of words. Researching for Coste Lewis—as it is for Howe and Trethewey—means researching back, a critical and creative strategy to interrogate the past and to write poetry that shifts our knowledge in the present.

Let’s remember what Frank O’Hara says in his poem “Having a Coke with You”: “what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them / when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank / or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully / as the horse / it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience / which is not going to go wasted on me / which is why I’m telling you about it.” Research desires touch. Research does no good without the kind of intimate knowledge we associate with lovers. And also what Guy Davenport discovers in his essay “Finding”: “I learned from a whole childhood of looking in fields how the purpose of things ought perhaps to remain invisible, no more than half known.” I want a research that follows the unsystematic, lackadaisical, and serendipitous zig-zag of walking through an oak savanna or reconstructed prairie. Finally, for now, I return to Susan Howe after Leaving the Atocha Station . Unlike Adam Gordon, Howe does not go in fear of experience. “In this room I experience enduring relation and connection between what was and what is,” she writes. Language remains the quarry, truth and beauty still the quest.

• William Carlos Williams
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Hai-Dang Phan was born in Vietnam and grew up in Wisconsin. He is an assistant professor of English at Grinnell College.

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How to Research Poetry

To locate biographical material or criticism in books, perform an alphabetical SUBJECT SEARCH in the Library Catalog ( catalog.nypl.org ) typing in the last name of the poet followed by the first name.

The search yielded six different subject headings. It is important to look deeper into each one of these headings, especially the one that indicates "Criticism and Interpretation." In this example, there are nine books of criticism and interpretation of Sexton's poetry.

• Once you find a book of on the shelf, check books nearby with similar call numbers for other sources.
• Pay special attention to the bibliographies and suggestions for further reading. These lists will contain titles of other books and journal articles that are related to the subject.
• Biographies do more than tell the life stories of a poet: they often contain criticism of specific poems that is accessed through the index in the back of the book.

REFERENCE BOOKS - Multi-volume and self-indexing sources

**The information in the following Magill's books is also available at the Mid-Manhattan Library from the online database Magill On Literature Plus .

• Magill's Critical Survey of Poetry-English Language Series** This 8-volume set presents an essay on each poet included. Each essay contains essential information that includes: Principal poetry, Other Literary forms, Achievements, Biography, Analysis, and Bibliography. An excellent introduction to poetry criticism. The index at the end of the eighth volume is very useful.
• Magill's Critical Survey of Poetry-Foreign Language Series ** Arranged similarly to the English Language Series, this series contains extensive essays on poets who wrote in a language other than English. The essays include the same information found for poets in the English Language Series. Volume 5 indexes the entire set and contains longer essays that discuss an entire country's poetry. Examples of some essays include: "Hungarian Poetry," "Ancient Greek Poetry", and "Third World Poetry."
• Magill's Masterplots II-Poetry Series ** This multi-volume set focuses on analyzing specific famous poems. Use the index in Volume 9 to locate the poet, then the poem you are researching. Each signed essay has three sections: "The Poem," "Forms and Devices" and "Themes and Meanings."
• Explicator Cyclopedia (in 2 volumes) Ref 820.9 E; Kept at Librarians Desk. References to brief but important criticism of specific poems arranged alphabetically by poet. Each entry originally appeared in the journal The Explicator. The contributor's name and date of publication is given.
• Poetry Criticism This very popular reference series contains "excerpts from criticism of the works of the most significant and widely studied poets of world literature." Ask at the librarian's desk to see the "Annual Cumulative Title Index" to determine the exact volumes and pages that mention the specific poem or poet you are researching. In addition, you can use the Gale Literary Index from the Literature Resource Center database to get an index to articles in a wide variety of literary criticism sets.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES - books that direct you to other books and journal articles that discuss the poet you are researching.

The following helpful bibliographies refer you to the exact pages a given poem is discussed in periodicals or books.

• Kuntz, Joseph M, ed. Poetry Explication: a Checklist of Interpretation since 1925 of British and American Poems Past and Present
• Martinez, Nancy C., ed., Guide to British Poetry Explication (in three volumes)
• Coleman, Arthur, ed., Epic and Romance Criticism
• Anderson, Emily Ann, ed., English Poetry , 1900-1950
• Aubrey, Bryan, ed., English Romantic Poetry. (Magill Bibliographies)
• Leo, John R., ed., Guide to American Poetry Explication, Vol 2, Modern and Contemporary

REFERENCE BOOKS - Complete in One Volume

Contemporary Poets REF 821.914 Kept at librarian's desk Concise, signed, articles about poets that include personal information, a list of publications, and a critical examination of the complete body of works with a look at a few specific poems.

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics REF 808.103. Kept at librarian's desk. If you are seeking definitions of poetic terms, poetic movements, and an essay on the poetry of a given country, this is an excellent place to start. Each entry, though often brief, is exhaustive, and is signed, often with a bibliography.

Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century Ready REF 811.5 This is a good starting source for researching American poets and poetic movements of the 20th century. A concise biography and a useful list of suggestions for further reading follow a signed essay discussing the poets and their major achievements. In depth analysis of one or more specific poems is often included.

ONLINE POETRY CRITICISM

The New York Public Library subscribes to many databases that contain either citations to, or in many cases the full text of, critical articles from literary journals and books. Some of these databases are available from home with a valid New York Public Library card at www.nypl.org/databases . The Literature Resource Center and Magill On Literature Plus are two excellent databases that provide many full-text articles of criticism and biography. Other databases such as JSTOR and the MLA Bibliography are more advanced, but link to information from the best literary journals and chapters of books.

For more help on using these and other online databases ask the literature librarian and consult the guide entitled ONLINE LITERARY CRITICISM: A Guide to Research available at the library.

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A Defence of Poetry Study Guide

Related Papers

Maria Concetta Genova

Joann K Deiudicibus

On Shelley's theories of poetry and criticism, their place among his contemporaries et al, and a defense of his work in response to his critics. Note that I use the masculine pronoun he in this essay to be more succinct as I am writing mainly about male authors, although the larger concerns are those of any author.

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Trisha Sengupta

The Romantic poets pursued the infinite and the invisible; they went beyond the limit of this phenomenal and nominal world in quest of absolute reality, or eternity. Also, it was the faculty of imagination, which was for them the gateway to the invisible and infinite worlds. They insisted that imagination, far from dealing with the fictitious and the non-existent, unravelled the mystery surrounding spiritual truths. They believed that when imagination was at work, it endowed one with a special insight to look beyond the surface and also enabled one to see things that intelligence could not reach. Shelley declared in his A Defence of Poetry that imagination was the highest faculty of man, and that the poet endowed with this faculty, possessed a special insight. This research paper does an analysis of one of P. B. Shelley's most influential works, A Defense of Poetry, reflecting that the main focus of poetry is to unveil the perfection of a world that is shrouded by darkness and uncertainty. To understand the significance of Shelley's essay, the paper outlines the critical line of thought on poetry back to its predecessors like Plato, who viewed poetry as blasphemous, and Aristotle, who considered poetry as a symbol of the eternal truth. The paper also explores the functions and responsibilities of poetry while elucidating the power of imaginative faculty.

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Composition and publication history, themes, analysis, and possible contexts of "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," "Ozymandias," "Ode to the West Wind," and "The Cloud."

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ENG 102 - Poetry Research

• 3. Narrow Your Topic

As you start to work on your thesis and supporting examples, you'll want to brainstorm keywords that might help you find secondary sources. You may decide to adjust your topic or thesis as you search for sources. This is a natural part of the research process.  See below for some help on brainstorming keywords.

As you think about what concepts you want to write about, think about what particular words might be found in a good article about that topic. Consider the following when searching databases and e-books:

• Enter the name of the poem with the word "and" and the concept you are looking for  E xample: "The Raven and Death"
• Keywords work best by trial-and-error
• Never do only one search

Revenge --- Vengeance

Death --- Mortality --- Murder

Gender --- Feminism --- Sex

Remember to also use "Search Within Results" option to search further into your results.

• Use "Ctrl F" to search for specific words within a particular article.
• And remember to  ask a librarian  if you need assistance coming up with keywords or looking for sources.
• << Previous: 2. Explore Your Topic
• Next: 4. Find Sources >>
• 1. Getting Started
• 2. Explore Your Topic
• 4. Find Sources
• 5. Cite Your Sources
• 6. Evaluate Your Sources
• 7. Write Your Paper
• Literary Criticism Guide

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2024 Open Submissions

CavanKerry Press accepts submissions for poetry collections, nonfiction essay collections, and memoir. Selected titles will be published by CavanKerry Press and receive national distribution.

CavanKerry Press publishes works that explore the emotional and psychological landscapes of everyday life , regardless of the author's prior publication history. We are particularly interested in receiving more work from queer, trans, and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) voices and are committed to publishing a diverse roster of authors each year. With our LaurelBooks: The Literature of Illness and Disability imprint, CavanKerry is also especially engaged with work from people living with physical and/or mental illness and disability. Our Florenz Eisman Memorial Collection features authors from our home state of New Jersey.

All poetry manuscripts must be a minimum of 50 pages and should not be much longer than 100 pages. Nonfiction manuscripts should not be much longer than 200 pages.

• Submit your previously unpublished manuscript with a table of contents.
• Manuscript should be formatted on a Word document or .PDF using a standard font (such as Times New Roman or Calibri) and standard margins. Prose entries should be formatted with 1 and 1/2 or double spacing,
• All manuscripts will be read anonymously. Please do not include your name on any pages of the manuscript. Manuscripts with personally identifying information may be rejected without consideration. Search (Ctrl-F) or use the Find and Replace (Ctrl-H) tool for your first name and last name individually and either delete your name or replace it with XXXXXX. 
• Include a cover letter with the following information: 
• title of the manuscript
• author name
• telephone number
• email address
• social media handles and website address if applicable

Individual poems or essays in a manuscript may have been previously published in magazines, journals, or anthologies, but the work as a whole should be a new, unpublished collection.

Simultaneous submissions to other publishers are permitted. Please notify Gabriel Cleveland , Director/Managing Editor, promptly if a manuscript is accepted elsewhere. The first round of submissions will be read by a diverse pool of outside readers, with subsequent rounds being read by CavanKerry authors and our editorial staff. Final decisions will be made by CavanKerry staff based on the quality of work and its alignment with our commitment to expanding the reach of poetry to a general readership. Decisions regarding acceptance of manuscripts for publications will be made by the end of February the following year. Please do not contact us with inquiries on the status of your submission until this period of time has ended.

For extended guidelines, please refer to https://cavankerrypress.submittable.com/submit

CavanKerry Press endorses and abides by the  Code of Ethics  developed by the  Council of Literary Magazines and Press (CLMP).

CavanKerry Press does not discriminate against any applicant on the basis of race, color, religion, orientation, identity, national origin, political affiliation, belief, age, or disability. Upon request, accommodation will be provided to allow individuals with disabilities to utilize CavanKerry’s services.

CavanKerry Press will make a reasonable effort to remove barriers at events locations and, where possible, choose barrier-free venues. CavanKerry Press has a designated coordinator to facilitate compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, as required by Section 35.107 of the US Department of Justice regulations, and to coordinate compliance with sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.